Sad Realization

This morning, as The Girl woke me up at about 30 minutes before my alarm went off, I had the good idea to take her for a walk around the block while Mom was at swim practice.  I got some coffee at Starbucks and then headed over to the pool to watch Mom.  She wasn't exactly in a talking mood, seeing as she was in the middle of a practice, but the swim coach was a bit more open.

He is finishing up college, which immediately made me feel like an old man.  More flatteringly, though, it made me feel like a grizzled vet as I gave him all sorts of triathlon tips and tried to get him to sign up for his first.  Though, I don't think that my pitch to the, ahem, swim coach, of "the swimming part is the least important" really resonated.  I guess I could have phrased that better.

As the conversation moved forward, I mentioned how important transitions are, and then furthering the point of Swims Don't Matter, I told him how last year I took over 2 minutes off my T1 time by clipping my shoes into my bike and jumping on barefoot.  It took me one weekend to learn that trick and shave those two minutes off my time.  The sad realization I had was that I've been doing this master's swim program for five years now, and it's taken all of that time for me to take 2 minutes off my 400 m swim time.

To make myself feel a bit better I went home and did some math to figure out how much faster I am as a percentage of the actual event time (e.g., going from 9:15 down to 7:24 is 20% faster).  So from that perspective, I've gotten 20% faster in the swim, 15% faster in the bike, and a stunning 30% faster on the run (only stunning because of how high the starting number is).

My T1 time is 70% faster, smh.

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